Petit Mal
by Wotcherer
Summary: Things come back to Delia in scraps and in surges, in unknown yet familiar places. But there are always gaps, and one has someone's name on it, someone who she is desperate to remember. [Post-Series 4]
1. Chapter I

The first time she remembers, they're on Castle Beach. She knows its Castle Beach because she's been told. Just like she knows they're in Tenby visiting her aunt because she's been told that too. And its in the same way she knows which room in her house is hers, which tree in the garden was her favourite to climb, the route to the village shop. She knows because someone has recounted it to her, softly, like she's a child, with hope in their eyes, and then disappointment as she accepts it as the truth but it does nothing to kick-start a flood of memories. There are some things that come naturally to her though. She knew how she took her tea – with a little more milk than her mam had put in the first time. She knew that her bedside table ought to be on the right hand side – tad had swapped it around. She knew where the dog liked to be scratched – Rhett's back leg had pounded into the floor in approval.

After two weeks in the house, her mam has grown despondent - _still nothing, cariad?_ She would say. So, a visit to her aunt, another woman she should know but doesn't, has been arranged. Her mam doesn't say it, but when they get to the house, when she's gently welcomed by cousins she can't remember, when the wealth of new names and faces begins to make her head pound, she can see it in her eyes – _still nothing._ Her cousin suggests a walk on the beach, just they two, something she isn't opposed to – the first time she'll be without her mam in what isn't really very long, but in what feels like an age because of all she's learned and struggled to retain. She senses the unease with her mother, but her aunt encourages her to give her a hand with hemming her curtains, since she's so very good with the sewing machine, and reluctantly she permits it. _Look after her, Gwen._

Gwen and her were close once, apparently, and she feels guilty as the other woman's warmth and friendliness tapers off when she can't meet it. They walk in near silence, her cousin quietly accepting that it may be more fruitful if she's just allowed to take in her surroundings. So she does. She loves being outside, she doesn't know why – maybe its because she feels as if she's going stir crazy inside that house, her mam by her side almost every waking minute, or maybe its because she used to love the outdoors. In a place like this, she's sure she must have. It seems apt that the first time she remembers – really, truly, remembers – its here.

Staring out into the sea, she doesn't know why it's St. Catherine's Island, but that's its name. And that's The Fort. _A Palmerston Fort, granite and limestone, with big guns,_ her father would say. And here, right here, is where they would build a structure in its image. A fort of crates, a seaweed banner, a moat dug with saltwater that would seep from what seemed like the centre of the Earth to fill it, with driftwood cannons and a battle that would last all afternoon. Sand caking socks until they were peeled off and abandoned, wind whipping their hair, and David and Alan and Lowri and Gwen. She felt a hand on her arm, her cousin looking panicked – she thought she was having a spell. But she smiled, widely, for the first time in a long time.

After that it happens again and again. She doesn't need to be told how she climbed that tree – she can see the view from it in her mind, the little cottages, the fields, the birds she's so close to she feels like one of them. When she's allowed to walk Rhett alone she doesn't take him to the village shop and back in a rehearsed route, she forgoes her mam's instructions and turns left at the end of the road, heading for the pond she knows he lives for jumping in. She watches him leap through the water, laughing, knowing how many times she's been chastised for bringing him home soaked and muddy before. Gwen comes to visit and they talk like old friends, the old friends that they are, and she asks how little Helen and Ceri are doing – much bigger now, apparently. She begins to put together the pieces of her childhood, she begins to see how much she loved it here, what kind of life she had. And it feels good.

She knows that she left it behind though, that she went to London and studied nursing and worked in a big hospital and lived in a nurse's home. But again, she only knows that because she was told, and none of it lives on in her mind like her childhood is beginning to. Her mother doesn't want to tell her about those things, she can sense that much. Mam purses her lips together when she enquires, reluctantly revealing snippets as and when she asks for them, claiming that she didn't put all that much in her letters. And when she asks for the letters she sent, her mam says she doesn't have them anymore. She tries to keep London from her. She didn't want her to go in the first place. _Still nothing_ , but she says it with far less disappointment this time. So she asks her tad, and he tells her of how she stayed in school all the way through as her peers dropped off one by one, getting married, getting jobs in the village or the town, he tells proudly her of her big dreams and her big mind that is now battered and bruised and broken.

Something is missing, she often thinks. Now she starts to realise there are gaps and she's desperate to fill them. Sometimes she trails off when she's speaking, the right word lost to her, but she knows it will come back into her head if she waits patiently, after a few seconds, or eventually. The cogs in her mind turn staggered and laboured, nuts and bolts gradually tightening with the help of invisible fingers, but they're moving and they're alive. The next time she feels as happy as she did on that beach, it's at Alan's house. There are more people she doesn't know there, but they tell her their names and this time they don't slip out of her mind after all of five seconds only for her to have to tentatively ask again, disappointing everyone. Their faces flood back into her mind, and that makes her happy enough. But then Harry limps inside, his face screwed up, and she stands instinctively, feeling her mam's disapproving gaze as she overexerts herself, scooping him up under the arms and setting him down on the kitchen counter. She thumbs away his tears and cuddles him and inspects his knee. _The corner of a flannel and some antiseptic,_ she thinks to herself instantly. _It's so raw he may need some_ _gauze on that_. She asks Alan's wife, Jean, what she's got in the cupboards and she tends to his injury with hands that seem so practiced – because they are. She knows what she's doing and it's coming so naturally to her.

She lies in bed that night, thinking so hard her temples burn with the effort of it, but Nurse Busby comes into the world again. She's a reality, not a story tad told her. She comes slowly, in snippets. Leaning over a pad of paper in a lecture, wheeling a gurney down hallways she knows like the back of her hand, in the rear of an ambulance, the siren blaring with red and blue illuminating the dark London streets. But she's real and they're the same person – almost. She wants to be her again, and she has a reason to remember now beyond making her mam and tad and everyone else happy. Because somehow she knows that being this person made _her_ happy.

Nurse Busby pours over textbooks that lay unpacked in boxes that were kept in her mam's room for reasons she can't be bothered to argue about. Nurse Busby reads them slowly, struggling over words that aren't used in everyday conversation, in the newspapers her tad brings home from the village shop, in the books on the shelf in the living room. It feels like revision for an exam, it feels like reminding herself of things she learned long ago. Mam doesn't think she'll be a nurse again, and she doesn't want to agree with her but she can't be sure yet, but despite that this is undoubtedly doing wonders for her. Still though, as things she drilled into her brain repeatedly at a desk with untold mugs of coffee in her hand make sense to come back to her, she still can't remember her life in London, her life outside of this. Perhaps she didn't have one, perhaps she was completely dedicated to her profession and nothing else, but the way she smiles when a song she knows comes on, the way she enjoyed the two birthday parties she's been to now since coming home, makes her think that she certainly can't have been that boring.

The next time she has that feeling again, the one she had on the beach, and the one she had when dressing Harry's knee, that feeling of images flooding uncontrollably into her brain that seem like they were there before, she doesn't feel happy. She feels so very confused. Nothing prompted it, and perhaps that's why. She sits bolt upright in bed, reaching for the top button of her pajama shirt and thumbing it open, the sheen on her chest quickly evaporating, the sleep scratching the corner of her eye as she rubs it away. Knotted fingers and entangled legs, bodies pressed together and lips open on her neck, breathing gently together and breathing all out of time. She can't make sense of it. Did she dream it up completely? She must have. Perhaps it was a sign of the wild imagination tad talked fondly of returning, though she can't fathom why it would choose such things to conjure, why she, with her only life experience having been gained in the last couple of months, would even know what it was to be close to someone in that way. Unless she'd had someone in London, someone she hadn't told her mam about. Or perhaps she had just got caught in the moment with them, just once. She was a wild and passionate girl – she remembered well enough by this point what she was like as a child. She wasn't surprised or even disappointed with herself. She was just worried that someone might be waiting for her, somewhere.

She knew she ought to leave it be. If she had been caught up in such affairs in London, she knew well enough that it was probably for the best she had forgotten all about it, and until she could be sure that she'd just had a vivid but entirely fictional dream, she should really stop letting it occupy her mind. But the very next night she wills herself to think on it. As a girl she had always been able to control her dreams to some extent – if she put something in her mind firmly enough it would stay there as she drifted off. This time she doesn't jerk awake with her heart pounding, but as the sun flitted into her room like streamers through the gaps in the curtains, waking her gently, she doesn't open her eyes. This time it was chatting late into the night, it was going to the pictures and holding hands in the dark, pinching lint from clothes, and she wills it not to end. Delia was laughing, flirting, stroking blonde hair from her face. _It was a woman_.

She should be just as confused as she was the night before. She should be disgusted, outraged even. But she's not. For the third time since she had gotten home things clicked into place in the most pleasant way, perhaps even more wonderfully than they had before. And more than Pembrokeshire, more than nursing, she feels like she needs to know everything about what had just come back to her. Mam was worrying about her all the time now, thought she was having spells when really she was just lost in thought as she began to carefully, tenderly, piece back together this person. It feels as natural as breathing, the idea that she had all this tangled, broken apart love in her for a woman. And it feels just as natural to be realising it all over again.

 _Patsy_. She says it out loud at the breakfast table one day, her mouth agape, and she's almost tempted to cover it after her outburst. Her mother turns, eyebrows raised. _What about her, cariad?_ Surely mam can't know – she panics, and her mother coddles. She explains softly that she was her friend, the one she was going to move in with, the one who came to visit her at the hospital. Mam doesn't seem to know anymore than that, and Delia suddenly recalls the crying girl at her bedside. She struggled to form memories at first, let alone remember before. But right now she sees her, she sees her pained, tear stained face and she feels so terribly sad. She wonders where she is, what she's doing, if she's missing her – but somehow she knows that she is.

Its happening again, she's loosing her train of thought in her panic, her head is pounding as she struggles to put together a sentence with so many things swirling around in the back of her throat begging to get out and she feels sick. Has she written? Does she have their address? She wants to write her – she wants to go upstairs and write her a letter right now saying all the things she knows and asking about all the things she doesn't. But she can't, not if mam has to help her, and not to mention it takes her forever to write things and she wants to send her something this instant – she wants to run down to the post box and catch the postman on his rounds right now – mam would never let her though, she doesn't know where the postbox is. "Mam, I want…can I..." She stalls, knitting her brow.

"Don't stress yourself, Delia." Mam reaches across the table to cover her hand, looking concerned.

" _Mam_." She says, with desperation in her tone through the pain in her forehead. "I want to write to her."

Her mother sighs, looking concerned, and squeezes her hand, "Alright, cariad. You write to Patsy then. I'll post it when you're done."


	2. Chapter II

She stands in the pews and doesn't have to struggle through the hymnbook she holds open before her, slow to read a language that means more to her than just letters placed one after the other. Not once the choir starts singing. Every single time she's stood here before watching tad and the men in chorus, feeling the bass reverberate around the tiny church and ricochet between the valleys, comes back to her along with the words. She hears the stream that trickles past their cottage and she's there, seven years old and wading through what little water still flows in the summer. Skirt hitched up and toes gripping mossy pebbles, clapping reeds between her hands and pretending she's caught fish, a long gone Maybn barking and bounding at the banks, her only companion when her cousins aren't there. Her tad takes her to the pub when mam is visiting their elderly neighbour down the lane and someone puts bow to fiddle, and then someone puts fingers to guitar strings, and tad beats his hand on the table in time so hard the froth of his stout breaches the edges of his glass. It doesn't take her long before the celebrations of a village rugby win, the wedding receptions, the St. David's days, culminate in her humming along. And despite the fact there's no occasion but pure joy, it feels like there's one.

Just as Wales lives deeply in her, in her blood, as every sound and sight draws it out of her a little more every time her senses are nourished, its Patsy that lives in her heart. She doesn't have to hear her to know that with every fibre of her being, though her voice might help her to clear the London smog in her mind that bars her from some memories she knows are there but cannot wipe clean enough to see clearly. She hears her sometimes anyway, as an echo or a shout, as a nurse or her sweetheart, and sometimes at night as her lover. Her voice is plummy, and she knows she would once mock her, a blush creeping up her cheeks, as she didn't dare send a jibe in return. It tells her to sleep after a night shift, not to wait up. It tells her the best way of making beds, it tells patients to hope and stay calm, it tells her in the still of the darkness that it loves her. And as she begins to remember what happened and when, and in what order, and as she remembers whispering hands stealing touches in danger and louder lips snatching kisses in safety, she starts to see herself not as the passive recipient of Patsy's love, but as a giver of it too. She's becoming her own person with every minute that passes, she's becoming Delia again, and she smirks to herself the very day it becomes apparent that it was her who chased Patsy, her who risked everything – though it wasn't a risk, not truly, because she knew – by kissing the other woman, her who teased and flirted and titillated the blonde who became her love who became a redhead who became a midwife.

Her mother is angry at her tad. She's had a long day. Church then home then the pub, and then home again. It's too much, but its not. She loves to be out there, she loves when she pieces things together and she feels as if her mind's done all the mending it possibly can within the confines of the cottage. She wants to explore, she wants to ramble through the fields and the trees and get lost with Rhett, she wants to walk down the lanes with her tad to the family's farm and carry buckets, she wants to be in London. To hear her heels click on pavement and echo through narrow streets not sink into the earth, to leap on the back of buses and not tractors, to hear Patsy's breathing send her to sleep and not the trickle of water. Her tad glances over some letters mam has written to send to family, asking if he wants to add anything, cracking jokes. _Wonder if any of the Bevan girls can still read the language, if I'm honest. You're the only one of 'em who married a proper Welshman._ He grins across the table at her, and her mam rolls her eyes, and she gets his joke, connecting the dots, which makes her feel happy – one aunt in London, one aunt in a more anglicised Tenby, and her mother here. As he grasps a pen, stroking his chin, it pops into her head, like so many things do, disconnected and in pieces – an unfinished train of thought from days or hours, earlier.

"I'm going to write my letter to Pats." She announces, standing up and abandoning her tea.

"Sit right back down and you wait. You have to help me clean up since you're feeling so much better." Mam gives her that look – the one that says not to argue. She can, of course, but there is entirely no point. Among the many things she's remembered since coming home, how not to annoy her mother is one of them, and most of the time she employs her long amassed skills.

Her tad takes his cap off, placing it on the table and turning to her mother. "Let her go write to her London friends. She's had a long day and if you keep her up anymore she won't be able to and its Sunday the day after next." He's right. If she doesn't finish her letter tonight for mam to post tomorrow then it'll have to be posted on Monday. She can't even imagine how much Patsy must be beside herself – its been so long.

"She's stressing about it. Look at her." Mam argues back, gesturing to her stood by the table, anxious, fiddling with the thread at her sleeve. "Your writing will come back in its own time, and your friend can wait, cariad. I've written her to let her know how you are, I've told you that."

Delia chews her lip, "I _can_ write, mam." Albeit not with all the confidence of her former self. "And I want to write to her myself." She turns tail and heads up the stairs, flinging open her bedroom door and sitting determinedly at her desk. She doesn't know how long ago her mother wrote to Patsy – she had mentioned it but mam 'couldn't remember' exactly, or perhaps it was that she herself couldn't, things still slipping through the cracks in her mind. But she has to tell Patsy she's okay, she's on the mend, and more importantly – that she remembers her.

Once she's there though, and the piece of paper is in front of her, a few sentences clumsily scrawled, she doesn't know what to do. She tries to let the words flow from her pen, but Welsh wants to come out, and her stream of consciousness wouldn't be appropriate. It's fragmented, and not to mention this letter is going into her mother's hands – it has to keep them together, allowed to exist, but it has to make Patsy happy and she doesn't know how to tell her all the things she wants to, how to tell her she remembers.

 _Dear Patsy,_

No.

 _My darling Pats,_

Mam can't know.

 _Dearest Patsy._

Good.

 _Dearest Patsy,_

 _My mam tells me she has written to tell you how I am – a while ago. I'm afraid you might be worrying, if she was truthful, because I wasn't well at all then. I am getting better now, I am remembering. She is going to post this letter for me tomorrow, and I can't wait for it to get to you._

She screws up her nose, clutching the pen in a vice like grip. She writes like a child and she can't stand it. She knows what she wants to say, and if she could say it all it would flow much easier, but the limitations placed on her words because the truth must remain a secret is causing a disconnect in her brain. She has too much to think about – the writing is hard enough – but she has to be so very careful and its hard.

 _My childhood here came back first. Being home, being around my family, helped with that. Then being a nurse. I think that I studied very hard, reading the same things again and again, doing the same things. That's probably why that is. Also caring for people is part in parcel of nursing, and I have lots of little children running around me these days. You'd love them. They're like the cubs but worse behaved._

Her head pounds, and she clutches it between her hands, rubbing her temples. She can write about Wales all she likes, she can write about what's real here, what's happening – that's easy. But she can't write about what she knows to be true about Patsy and her. If she's ever going to get back to her, she has to keep them safe. But she doesn't want to hurt her, she doesn't want her to think she's writing as a friend, a friend whose writing because mam mentioned her crying at her bedside so she feels obliged. She _loves_ her, and she's surer of that than anything she's rediscovered since coming home.

 _I've remembered you though – please don't worry about that. It feels like everything, but perhaps its not, perhaps not every excursion, not every chat. But what's important, what's important about my life in London – that I know now. Please be sure of that._

It's Patsy. She's what is important about London. Nursing was wonderful too, and she loved the city, but she could live with a hospital in Swansea like her tad had gingerly suggested as an option if she made a recovery, much to mam's disapproval, if she didn't have all the love in the world to return to. She can't write anymore, she can't make her mind connect to the appratus clutched clumsily in her hand, she's embarrassed about her handwriting and wonders if Patsy will even be able to decipher it, she can't see through the fog of the headache that's trying to beat its way out of her skull. Or is that the knocking on the door?

 _All my love,_

 _Delia_

 _Delia?_

 _Delia!_

The door opens and she doesn't look up. She can't lift her head.

"Oh, cariad. Look at the state of you. Into bed – right now. Your tad should never have taken you out." She obliges because like this she can't do anything but what she's told. She pulls herself up from the chair, the room pulsating around her and the bed a mass in the middle of it.

"Mam, its there." Her voice cuts through the pain in her head as she points towards her desk.

"Alright, cariad. I've got it." She sounds exasperated, and folds up the paper, slipping into an envelope. "It'll go in the morning with along with the others."

She breathes deeply, sinking into her mattress and thumbing open the buttons at the front of her dress, her sharp wittedness returning in near full force as she's tempted to ask her mam if she's going to get her ready for bed and brush her teeth for her too, but she bites the words back. She thinks of how Patsy will smile when she reads her letter, as minimal and careful as it is. She knows that the other woman will get her message loud and clear, and although she hasn't said all she wishes to, she also knows that it'll be enough for her. Patsy was always quiet in her expressions, subtle and understated, but they always spoke loudly to Delia, and she's confident that this will do the same. Though she smirks to herself softly, knowing that she could be a little obtuse at times. It'll be enough though – it has to be.


End file.
